The Chicago Bears stadium bill saga is all over (for now) but the shouting, and there is So. Much. Shouting. Take your pick of the takes: Illinois legislators are to blame for fumbling the ball into the Bears’ hands. The Bears leadership is to blame for toying with Chicago’s affections. It takes a big pony to pull a big wagon. Collect ’em all!
Or you can stick with the one take that matters:
People seem to be forgetting that the Bears can just continue to play in Soldier Field for as long as the team wants.
Yuppppp. Arguing whether the failure of the legislature to pass subsidies for the Bears was a sign of an inept government or inept team management is missing the point: This was a crisis entirely of team ownership’s own making. It was Bears CEO Kevin Warren who set an end-of-May deadline — while simultaneously saying “we don’t have a set deadline” — in hopes that the threat of the team moving to Indiana would shake loose a couple billion dollars in tax breaks and transit upgrades. And if team execs now don’t like the choice of either Arlington Heights (stripped of the assurance of tax dollars) or Hammond, they can always just go back to what they’ve been doing the last few years and wait things out while playing in the stadium Chicago taxpayers paid to rebuild for them 23 years ago; they can even decide to stay there permanently, if the prospect of paying their tax bill in Arlington Heights is too pricey, and of moving to Indiana is too Indiana-y. (It’s happened before!) This wasn’t a fumble; it was an attempt at a cash grab, one that didn’t pay off, and now Bears owner George McCaskey needs to decide what cards to play next, as sports owners always do.
Of course, not everyone was apportioning blame; some were doling out credit, to themselves, as in the statement by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker:
“The reality is that I wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to give it to a billionaire-owned family, or team, and believe very much that the incentives that we provide for businesses are to be similar to the incentives we provide to this type of business,” Pritzker said at his Capitol office, after a marathon overnight conclusion to the session.
“As much of an emotional connection as many of us have to the Bears, and to keeping them in the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois, [the] No. 1 principle is we’re not going to foist this on the taxpayers of the state of Illinois,” Pritzker said.
That’s all very inspiring, or would be if not for the fact that Pritzker very much did try to foist billions of dollars of taxpayer money on a billionaire-owned team — plus billions more for other billionaire developers. I suppose it’s a sort of principle of treating all businesses the same, so long as you don’t count businesses that can’t afford to build $100 million–plus developments? Everybody loves a level playing field, so long as some fields are more level than others.
I’ll never understand why saying no is the same thing as failure.
From my perspective, the Illinois legislature didn’t fail; they succeeded in protecting the residents.
This is such a comedy show it’s hard to believe it’s not a satirical movie.
Pritzker and his fellow Dems have spent so much taxpayer money on things to enrich their friends it’s not even funny but they’ll draw the line at stadium subsidies -until the press gets so bad that is that they’re forced to do something. After all, avoiding bad press is really all they care about.
The Bears have two suburbs most people have never heard of fighting over putting a stadium and district there, until the Chicago mayor decides at the last minute that no the taxpayers should have the Bears build a stadium and then own it themselves and lease it to the Bears. Of course, none of these suggestions get the necessary votes or are even voted on by the state legislature in full.
All we need now is the inspirational story of a bunch of random Chicagoans buying the Bears after intense fundraising through some zany idea and keeping the Bears at Soldier Field. Roll credits featuring the soundtrack that tells us how fun and zany this movie was and maybe some outtakes.
I’m not 100% sure that in 2026 anyone can claim their ideological opposites aren’t fleecing taxpayers for the enrichment of themselves and their besties.
Without a doubt. Both parties are unbelievably corrupt at all levels.
This was never going to be easy. Normally to get a big project for the Chicago area, you balance in out with spending downstate. But giving money to the Bears is not popular in any part of the state. So the usual dance won’t work. Indiana, they thought they’d troll Illinois, but now might get stuck building a billion dollar stadium. Be careful what you troll for.
This is where things got weird with the idea of a “Bears only” bill. What is the legislative coalition for this? Some (but not all) suburban reps?
I do like this Tribune article, which doesn’t give a very satisfactory answer to the question in the title but does paint a picture of Brandon Johnson on his confused and completely disingenuous mission to “save” the Bears for Chicago. And in which the Bears, like some mythical princesses, show ambiguous feelings about being “saved”:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/06/01/chicago-bears-stadium-bill-collapse/
Re: Indiana’s troll, it feels like Johnson one-upp’ed them. The teacher’s union was writing poisonous memos about every form of stadium bill that was proposed. This guy would be horrified to wake up to Kevin Warren knocking on his door tomorrow to take him up on his offer.
And now it appears Senator Cunningham is suddenly feeling very silly. He’s roasting the Bears in the media for holding “backchannel discussions” with Chicago in April & May that “completely undermined” the bill:
https://x.com/CEmma670/status/2061809047301460155
He now professes bewilderment why any state government would subsidize a team moving cities within the same state, which… he spent the last several months attempting to do!
Many moons ago, I watched this sort of saga unfold with the Dallas Mavericks, who played at Reunion Arena at the time. The Mavericks began hitting up all of the local cities to try and get a new stadium. Dallas failed to offer enough.
Eventually Lewisville agreed to fund a stadium, but that required an increase in the sales tax, so it had to go to a voter referendum, while rumors were started about them moving to Birmingham AL (other city names were mentioned briefly).
The problem was that the Mavs had underachieved for many years, and were replete with issues (they kept drafting badly, Roy Tarpley being the worst in a large number of bad decisions, and one of the minority owners was Ross Perot Jr, who seemed to piss off everybody in Dallas every time he opened his mouth). A lot of people’s attitude to the threats of the Mavs to leave Dallas were “don’t let the door hit you on your way out”.
The referendum in Lewisville failed.
The Mavs stayed in Dallas, eventually moving to the American Airlines Center. The huffing and puffing did nothing.